At Chelsea Intermediate School, data is what drives our school.
Data pretty much determines everything. It is the premise behind every lesson taught and every meeting held.
Student achievement provides teachers with this data. Teachers then use this data to determine their instruction. Their instruction is then observed by administration and administration may ask why a particular lesson is being taught. The answer, data!
ChIS discovered, this year, that not all data is created equal. Some programs provide data that is easily obtained and used by teachers, some programs provide data but it is not beneficial to guiding instruction, and some programs provide no data at all.
Discovery Education (DE) is a program that has been used by ChIS in the past. It was dropped at the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year. It was quickly discovered that this was a big mistake. The goal of DE is to inspire learning in students while providing teachers with a variety of tools that help to make learning exciting. DE also provides several professional development opportunities for teachers through webinars, digital media integration, related links and many more. This is connectivism at its finest!
The assessment portion of DE is highly preferred by ChIS teachers. This assessment is taken three times per school year. This assessment is directly correlated to the ARMT + testing (Alabama Reading and Mathematics Test) that is administered to our students each spring.
For the first time, our students took the DE assessments on the computer. (These assessments may also be taken on paper, if preferred.) The benefit of taking this assessment on the computer is that teachers are able to obtain student test results immediately. Therefore, instruction can be tailored to each student’s needs. When taken on paper, it is approximately two weeks before the results can be available to the teachers. This is two weeks’ worth of instructional time that could have been geared specifically towards student weaknesses.
DE also provides teachers and administrators with graphs that show areas of strength and weakness for the whole class. Many times each of these areas are directly related to our school improvement plan that is updated yearly.
Data meetings are held at ChIS each month. The DE results are discussed at each meeting.
DE results provide a tremendous amount of support for our school. They guide instruction, are the backbone of our data meetings and even help to prepare our school improvement plan each year.
This program does come with a price, but this price is very small in comparison to how this program benefits our school on a daily basis!
I am in no way affiliated with the Discovery Education program, however, I wanted to share this amazing 21st century program with other administrators looking for a strong, valid, and reliable assessment tool for their school.
Check it out for yourself. I promise, you will not be disappointed!
http://my.discoveryeducation.com/
Stevi, I enjoyed using DE when I was in the classroom and also think it's a very valuable tool (I did not use the assessment piece). I know some of my teachers used it prior to funding disappearing as well. Two questions: 1)How was your school able to continue with the program? and 2) How were your teachers trained on using the assessment piece?
ReplyDeleteStevi,
ReplyDeleteI have never used Discovery Education, but it looks like it would be worthwhile to use across all grade levels. I noticed that it does have a middle school portion. I am also interested in how you guys funded the program and is every teacher using the program? Are you guys using the program just for reading and math? As you stated, the data piece is used in figuring out which kids struggle and in what specific areas. Thanks for sharing the resource!
Susan, we were able to use this program because we needed further data to help drive our instruction and we agreed to use it in addition to the programs recommended by Shelby County. All of our teachers were trained in using this program by our reading coach a couple of years ago. It is a very user friendly program and would take very little time to train new users.
ReplyDeleteCindy, ChIS was able to purchase DE with the help of our wonderful PTO. To be able to use the online assessments cost a little more than the paper and pencil version, but is definitely worth it! We are also using this program for reading, math, and science for both 4th and 5th grade level.